Learn to use Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online, Application Insights and Team Foundation Server to decrease rework, increase transparency into your application and increase the rate at which you can ship high quality software throughout the application lifecycle

IntelliTrace in Visual Studio Ultimate comes with support for tracing out of the box. All you have to do is make sure the appropriate IntelliTrace events are enabled in VS settings and IntelliTrace will capture trace statements as events.
When you...

Segmentation is one of my favorite features in Metrics Explorer in Application Insights . It helps you slice and dice the telemetry about what users are doing with your application, as well as helps you understand performance metrics.
Segmentation...

Application Insights lets you monitor your live application for its availability, performance and usage. Exception telemetry is of course, a central piece of this. In this blog, we’ll look at the compelling diagnostics experience enabled by capturing...

We are pleased to announce two new whitepapers have landed, sharing real-world experience and research feedback. Extracting effective permissions from TFS whitepaper and sample Practical guidance and sample code based on extensive research to address...

At last! Everyone's been asking for this, so we're very pleased to announce it.
You can set up a continuous export of your telemetry from the Application Insights portal in JSON format. We put the data into blob storage in your Microsoft Azure account...

Our previous post introduced Smart Unit Tests . Please read that first if you have not already done so. Now let us continue.
How is “Smart Unit Tests” able to generate a compact test suite with high coverage? How does it work? Having a...

Update: Added a Troubleshooting section. Introduction CodeLens is a heads-up display in your Visual Studio Editor where you can find information about your code in-context. We had enabled CodeLens in Visual Studio Online for select customers as...

The latest release of the Application Insights Status Monitor tool provides an update to the runtime instrumentation agent, which is a component of Application Insights that automatically discovers your code dependencies like SQL databases, other HTTP...

REST API’s are pretty cool, enabling you to do things like write your own custom reports, write your own interfaces and of course integrating load tests into your build. Looking at the sample referenced with our REST API documentation ; at 400 lines...

We’ve heard your feedback that you want the Visual Studio debugger to support child process debugging. Child process debugging means that when the application you are debugging creates another process, Visual Studio will detect this and automatically...

If you are using Visual Studio Fakes in your Unit Testing, and you created your test project from any of the below versions of Visual Studio, then if you upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, you may start hitting build errors around Microsoft.QualityTools...

If you have not already seen the brief video on the Smart Unit Tests feature , I urge you to do so; this feature can help you overcome any inertia in getting started writing unit tests. But there is much more to it than what is shown in the video and...

While the earlier blog on DevOps style deployment capability touched upon the scenarios for an individual developer, in this blog let’s look at how this experience can be extended to team. You would also want to refer Announcing DevOps style deployments...

By now you must be aware about the DevOps style deployment capability that was announced in Visual Studio 2015 preview. If not already, you would want to refer the announcement blog; Announcing DevOps style deployments using Visual Studio 2015 Preview...

This blog is an introduction to how users can execute Selenium tests using Cloud-based Load Testing from Visual Studio Online.
Introduction
Let's get familiar with Cloud-based Load Testing (CLT) from Visual Studio Online (VSO) and Selenium.
...

Ask a room of developers what is the first concept that they think of when they think about debugging and most of them will say: breakpoints. That is why with Visual Studio 2015 we significantly improved the ability to configure breakpoints with conditions...

January 14, 2015: Updated for the release of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5
Introduction
In Visual Studio 2013 we introduced the Memory Usage tool as part of the Performance and Diagnostics hub . This tool, like the rest of the profiling tools in the...

Update: Added a troubleshooting section. Introduction CodeLens is a heads-up display in your Visual Studio Editor where you can find information about your code in-context. CodeLens has now been enabled in Visual Studio Online for select customers as...

Last couple of weeks have been pretty crazy; in addition to the launching the new browser based Load Test Authoring experience at TechEd Europe, hosting the MVP summit, getting Update 4 released we have been working on getting Visual Studio 2015 Preview...

Anyone who uses LINQ (or lambdas in general) and the debugger will quickly discover the dreaded message “Expression cannot contain lambda expressions”. Lack of lambda support has been a limitation of the Visual Studio Debugger ever since Lambdas...

How to contact the most knowledgeable people about some code?
Let's assume for a minute that I've cloned the Entity Framework open source code, a bit more than half a year ago and started leveraging it. Recently I pulled the latest version, and I now...

In this post, we're going to walk you through how the new "filter link types" feature on code maps can be used to analyze dependencies and declutter maps when using them to understand the design of code.
Analyze dependencies
I'm trying to understand...

By now you will have heard the exciting news that Visual Studio 2015 supports C++ development on Android (and that includes an Emulator for Android ).
Obviously no development experience is complete without debugging support, so this means that Visual...

This post was updated in February 2015 to reflect the latest changes.
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 now has options for Android development: C++, Cordova, and C# with Xamarin. When choosing one of those Android development options, Visual Studio will...

While most teams realize integrating the development processes with the operation processes can return a ton of value –such as decreased release cycle times and much improved response times to live sight incidents most teams aren’t integrated...